Volume 38, Number 13 · July 18, 1991
A New Russian Revolution?
By Martin Malia
In the six-year-long disintegration of communism euphemistically known as 'restructuring' (the meaning, after all, of perestroika) the Russian elections of June 12 will surely count as a revolutionary turning point. In presidential and municipal balloting, the homeland of Leninism elected three anti-Leninist leaders—Boris Yeltsin, Gavriil Popov, and Anatoly Sobchak—by between 60 and 65 percent of the vote, against less than 25 percent for three Party presidential candidates combined. This occurred, moreover, in a contest that explicitly pitted 'democrats' against 'communists,' and in which the declared goal of the democrats was to liquidate definitively the country's crumbling 'totalitarian' structures in favor of the rule of law, private property, and the market. And the citizens of Leningrad voted by 55 percent to change their city's name back to St. Petersburg, thus symbolically repudiating the entire Soviet experience.
Feature, 3781 words
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